City drops appeal, letting stand a ruling that it violated The Lens’ right to examine public records

The city of New Orleans has dropped its appeal of a ruling that it violated The Lens’ constitutional right to examine public records. In exchange, The Lens has agreed to waive its claim to $2,500 in attorney’s fees awarded by a judge.

Lens attorney Scott Sternberg, of Sternberg, Naccari & White, said the money was not as important as the principle of the case.

“We were able to save the expense of the appeal and vindicate the judge’s ruling that the city was taking too long to produce these records and wouldn’t give us an estimate as to when we’d get them,” Sternberg said.

However, city spokeswoman Erin Burns said the city maintains it did comply with the law, but further litigation was unnecessary because the city implemented a new online system for requesting public records.

The system “allows the City to provide requesters with information about average response times and offer a number of other features that makes the process of public records requests more transparent,” Burns said.

The suit cited several instances in which the city had failed to provide records, and asked the judge to order the city to hand them over.

State law requires records to be produced immediately if they are not in use, or within three business days if they are. But the law recognizes that records may contain private information, such as Social Security numbers, that aren’t subject to public disclosure.

If the records are not immediately produced, the law requires the custodian to provide a reasonable estimate of how long it will take to collect, segregate, examine or review a request for any exceptions that apply.

The city’s practice, however, was to send a form letter, typically at the three-day mark, stating that the request was being reviewed. Those letters did not include a timeframe for producing the records.

Days after we filed our lawsuit, the city provided four of the five sets of records we had been waiting on. But the city did not provide the city’s purchasing database, called BuySpeed.

Reese ordered the city to produce the full purchasing database after The Lens and the city failed to reach an agreement on how to deal with private information.

The city appealed that ruling, but the two sides have recently resumed discussions to produce the purchasing database without further litigation. Sternberg said he is optimistic that The Lens and the city will soon have an agreement.

Marta Jewson covers education in New Orleans for The Lens. She began her reporting career covering charter schools for The Lens and helped found the hyperlocal news site Mid-City Messenger. Jewson returned to New Orleans in the fall of 2014 after covering education for the St. Cloud Times in Minnesota. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with majors in journalism and social welfare and a concentration in educational policy studies.